A cat a day keeps the doctor away...
On the top floor of an old building at the end of a cobbled alley in Kyoto lies the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul. Only a select few - those who feel genuine emotional pain - can find it.
The mysterious centre offers a unique treatment for its troubled patients: it prescribes cats as medication.
I grabbed this because I thought I'd need an antidote to Mean Streak, the other book I was reading. I really did — and as antidotes go, We'll Prescribe You A Cat was a pretty good one. Which is not to say it's unalloyed sweetness and light.
The book's starting point is that there is a mysterious clinic in Kyoto, that is only there some of the time, for some people. The doctor is unusual and the prescriptions he makes even more so — they're cats.
Each chapter is a fresh patient and a fresh cat - there's Bee, who helps salaryman Shuta find out that...maybe he really doesn't want to work in a sweatshop office environment after wall, and Margot, who reconnects Koga with his family, and with his new manager. Those two are pretty standard stories.
Then there's Yoyuki, a little white kitten, who helps Megumi and Aobi, a mother and daughter, reconnect, and helps Megumi with the memory of an abandoned kitten from her own childhood. In this chapter, I feel like there's either an influence from or a nod to The Cat Returns, a Studio Ghibli film directed by Hiroyuki Morita. Yoyuki, the modern day kitten, is named after Yuki, a little white kitten that Megumi found as a child; one of the cats in The Cat Returns is named Yuki as well. The movie's Yuki is similarly an abandoned white kitten in flashback. Now, one meaning for Yuki is 'snow', so two white cats called Yuki isn't itself unusual — but movie Yuki observes that "life is hard", and Megumi makes a similar observation as an adult that child-Megumi couldn't, that life as an adult is tough. I might be reaching, but it feels like there's maybe a little nod there. Yoyuki (the chapter, not the cat) also has the first hint about the origin of the mysterious clinic — Aobi, the daughter, thinks that the nurse looks somehow familiar, maybe like a woman in a maiko's uniform she saw at a friend's dance practice. (Maiko: a trainee geiko, the Kyoto name for a geisha.) And a neighbour in the same building as the clinic warns Megumi and Aobi that there's something hinky about that apartment's history.
Then we get to the last two stories, Tank and Tangerine, and Mimita. These two are much more closely tied together — and there's a time jump backwards too, that isn't signalled in the text, you have to put it together. When you do, you can deduce the full story of where the clinic came from, and the identity of the mysterious nurse and doctor who prescribe cats to help humans with their problems — after all, as Dr Nikké says, cats are superior to any other medication out there..
I enjoyed reading We'll Prescribe You A Cat and I'm very glad to read that there's a sequel on the way in 2025. Most reviews I've read about this book use words like 'quirky' or 'whimsical' or the like, and there are certainly elements of that there too, but there's also an undercurrent of sadness and grieving, especially as you get to the last chapter, Mimita. It's not overwhelming and there's an element of resolution to it. Overall, it's an enjoyable book, and a pretty fast read.
Does it live up to the blurb?
Oh lord, yes.
Started: 9 January 2025
Finished: 13 January 2025
Pages: 225, hardback
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